A Guide to Intelligent Reading
by Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren
426pp.
How to Read a Book first appeared in the 1940s, when Americans were conflicted about what it meant to be educated. Practical, literal-minded thinking was all the vogue, and so there was plenty of joking about the book's title—after all, if you didn't know how to read a book, how could you learn to do so from a book?
But there was also what was sometimes called (disparagingly) the “middlebrow” movement, driven by the idea that average people could benefit from studying the best that has been written and thought. This was a time when folks joined the Book of the Month club, watched popular dramas with a message, and listened to round-table discussions of literature on the radio.
Mortimer Adler was a central figure in the middlebrow movement. He thought that of the mountains of books that had been written, only a few of them were truly great books. Moreover, he thought that everyone regardless of their station in life could and should focus their attention on the great works rather than the lesser ones. Adler was not an egalitarian, nor was he deluded about people's differing abilities to learn. He compared those abilities to vessels of different capacities, and said that even though one vessel might hold less than another, each vessel should be filled to the brim—and filled with the richest cream, not skim milk or dirty water.
This wasn't mere academic speculation. Adler popularized the idea of studying the great books of the Western canon, to the point that in the early 50s there were hundreds of groups around the country meeting regularly to discuss Aristotle and Aquinas. He put together a list of what he thought qualified as great books, and persuaded the Britannica company to publish them as a 60-volume set, and then went on to completely redesign the Encyclopedia Britannica itself. In the 70s and 80s he was active in the Paedeia Project, an effort to restructure the public school curriculum so as to include study of the great books.
Adler referred to the Western canon of great books as “The Great Conversation,” in which each new author engages the ideas of those who came before, agreeing with them, disputing them, expanding on them, proposing alternatives to them. Adler also thought that the proper way for a reader to learn from these books was to fully participate in the conversation— questioning the wrter, drawing comparisons with what other writers had said on the subject, reaching one's own conclusions.
Adler realized that the Great Conversation wasn't your usual conversation, being that most of the participants were only indirectly present, through their books. But he insisted that conversation was still the best characterization of the act of reading intelligently, that we should view the writer of a book as someone who is looking to edify us, is prepared to answer our questions, is willing to argue a point, and is able to refer us to other thinking on the subject.
How to Read a Book contains much practical advice on how to properly converse with a book. And by “practical advice,” I mean advice that you can immediately put into practice. Adler teaches you how to scan through a book to find out what it is about, how likely it is to edify you, and how much effort (if any) you should spend on it. He teaches you how to mark up a book as you read it, —to make sure you know what the author is saying, to identify his important points, to follow and summarize his arguments, to mark points at which you agree or disagree or are just puzzled, to record your own ideas. He teaches you how to re-read a book you have marked up. And he teaches you how to read more than one book on a particular subject, comparing and contrasting what different authors have had to say about it.
And there is much, much more, so much that you will have to pick and choose among Adler's techiques in order to get started. But that is as it should be. Reading is not a skill to be valued for its own sake, but for what it allows you to accomplish, and so we should welcome any new habit that leads us to read more effectively. You're not likely to end up adopting every last one of Adler's techniques, but each one you do manage to adopt will make you a better reader. And the ones you haven't adopted yet will still be there the next time you read the book, available for your consideration.
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